


Spin Cycle

by MillyVeil



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Bits of Strike Team Delta Backstory, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Clint whump, Concussions, Drama, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Mission Fic, Mission Gone Wrong, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Near Drowning, Platonic Cuddling, SHIELD, Vomiting, Whump, Worried Natasha Romanov, bits of backstory, throwing up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-05-16 12:24:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19318126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillyVeil/pseuds/MillyVeil
Summary: Natasha froze. For a split second it seemed like the ice was hesitating, like it hadn’t made up its mind whether to hold or break. Then it gave another a wet crunch, and with a desperate sound Clint heaved himself towards her as it disintegrated under him. But he was too far away, and his fingers tips scrabbled uselessly against hers. Then he was in the water again. Under the surface again. And this time he didn’t resurface.ORNatasha is of the opinion that one should try to avoid falling through the ice. Especially when the ambient temperatures have plummeted into the teens. And there's nowhere around to get warm and dry. And the water turns into a whitewater rapid less than forty feet downstream. It's just common sense.In Clint's defense, he was dodging a bullet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have two WIPs languishing and what do I do? Why, I take a leaf out of Ranni's book and start writing something NEW! You're a horrible, horrible influence, darling. And the bestest writing buddy I could ever have. Thanks for letting me glance at your bad-things-happen bingo square, where I found the prompt 'falling through the ice'. 
> 
> Big thank you to Teeelsie, too! For your invaluable input and suggestions on various draft versions of this story. They made it so much stronger!

“Might wanna hurry up with that red carpet,” Clint said through the comm in Natasha’s ear. His voice carried loud and clear over the rumble of the rapids that broke free from the iced-up river in the darkness just beyond the bridge. “Got a visual. ETA thirty seconds.”  

“Copy that.” In the sharp light of her flashlight, her breath hung white and jagged in the air as she dragged the spike strip across both lanes. Thirty seconds was plenty for what she needed to do.

She scanned the direction from which their target would appear. They were miles away from the nearest house, miles away from anything, and with Clint having killed the lights above the bridge the night before, the area was steeped in heavy 2 a.m. darkness. She couldn’t see the headlights of the car yet, but Clint had a better vantage point. He was out there on the other side of the river, black-clad and hidden beyond the dense tree line, ready to cut off any retreat routes as soon as their target had passed him on its way to the bridge.

She pulled the spike strip another few feet before dropping it on the ground. The snow was hard under her knees, packed solid like concrete by traffic, as she kneeled down. Using her teeth she pulled her glove off and armed the spike strip with a push of a button. A small LED gave two quick blue flashes, telling her it was ready for use. The remote control in her pocket would allow her to deploy the spikes from a distance, at the moment of her choosing.

She got back up and jogged towards the end of the bridge, the opposite one from Clint. When she got there, she slipped off to the side, not bothering trying to hide her tracks as she climbed across the roadside snow bank; the clumpy snow and ice chunks left behind by plow trucks would mask her footprints well enough.

Behind the ridge, the snow was undisturbed and knee-deep, and she crouched down next to the first bridge post. In this position she was completely hidden from view. Unfortunately it also meant she had no sight lines. That wasn’t a problem. She would rely on her ears and on Clint until it was time to get up close and personal.

“In position,” she reported.

She could hear the approaching car now. The sound told her their target had chosen the X5 over the Jaguar tonight. It meant the jammer they had mounted earlier would earn its keep, because the SUV had something the Jaguar didn’t - an emergency assistance function. It wouldn’t help Fuller tonight; the thick blanket of electrical interference that wrapped around the bridge would make sure no automatically triggered call with crash data and information about the car’s location would go out. 

She turned off the flashlight. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, for the dark contours of her surroundings to become visible again. As she waited she tilted her head back and looked up, taking a few seconds to center herself further. A few high-altitude clouds hung above, painted silver by the crescent moon. Out here no urban light pollution obscured the stars, and as her eyes adjusted further a million little specks of light emerged in the blackness. The weather had cleared up during the early evening and the temperature had plummeted. By midnight it had dipped into the upper teens, and she spared a fleeting thought of gratitude for her warm winter getup. 

The engine noise grew louder. She unzipped her jacket and retrieved the remote control, then pulled her gun from the holster. The plan was to box them in. She would stay in front of the car, taking out the driver to make sure they didn’t try to escape on the rims. Clint would come up from behind, cutting off any retreat routes.

“He better not have the kid in the car this time,” Clint said, his breath catching on a soft grunt, like he was heaving himself up somewhere. He, too, was getting into a final position. “The asshole really needs to learn to respect the custody agreement. It’s Mommy’s weekend.” 

After he had aborted the mission two days ago when he’d spotted the child in the car just seconds before the hit was to go down, they’d had to re-plan the whole thing. She had proposed they use an IED to take the car out on the bridge. Clint had vetoed that right off the bat, no room for discussion. Intelligence had been wrong once, it might be wrong again.  

“He’s leaving the country in six hours,” she reminded him as she checked the magazine.

The pause was almost too short to notice. “I know.”

“We can’t afford to wait for another opportunity.”

“I _know_.”

Clint didn’t like the prospect that the child might be in the car this time, too, but Natasha was satisfied with what she heard in his tone. He'd see the job through. But beneath the grim determination she also heard the not yet fully formed anger over what he might have to do. He might have to kill a six-year-old girl’s father in front of her eyes. Natasha wasn’t heartless; she would always choose another way if there was one. But sometimes there simply wasn't one, and the good that would come from stopping Fuller from selling the bioengineered virus he had developed to some very unscrupulous buyers would vastly outweigh the trauma to this one child. It was a grim equation, one she knew Clint grudgingly accepted as part of the job, but never quite resolved within himself.

Long, sharp shadows suddenly moved across the top of the snow bank next to her, driven into flight by the approaching car’s headlights.

“Five,” Clint said. “Four.”   

She placed her finger on the button. He would let her know exactly when to deploy the stinger.   

“Three. Two. One. Go.”

She pressed the button.

The solid ‘chink’ was followed by a dull thump and the hard, scratchy sound of studded tires locking up, sliding across the wintery road. She put the trigger back in her pocket to the sound of metal, glass, and composite polymers impacting the guard rail. More skidding, another crunching impact, then all sounds of motion abruptly stopped.

“Beautiful,” Clint said in her ear.

She still couldn’t see the car from her position, but the red wash of the SUV's rear lights told her it must have spun and was now pointing in the opposite direction. When she cautiously peeked out, she saw she was right. The combination of shredded tires and slamming on the brakes had made the driver lose control, and judging from the debris that lay scattered across the lanes, the massive black SUV had bounced off the barriers on both sides, coming to a stop at an acute angle against the right guard rail.

The engine had cut out and all that was heard was the sound of violent, rushing water below. A tendril of steam rose from under the hood. 

“How many in the car?” she asked quietly.

“Unknown. I didn’t get a clear visual when they passed, the windows in the back are too heavily tinted. What I _can_ tell you is you've got two up front.”

A moment later the hard, flat ‘thwap’ of a bullet going through the laminated windshield was heard. Clint was using a silencer in a bid to keep the noise to a minimum. Despite the distance to the nearest house, it never hurt to be discreet. A moment later the horn started blaring, the sound sharp and loud in the silence of night. The driver must have slumped over the steering wheel. She grimaced. 

“Correction,” Clint said over the noise. “That’s one up front now, hiding in the passenger footwell.”

“Fuller?” 

“Gato. The bastard refuses to stick his head out, so I have no shot. You’re gonna have to deal with him.”

“I got him.” Natasha had seen Constantin Gato’s rap sheet. He wasn't their primary target, but she wouldn’t lose any sleep over killing him.

Inside the car, the immediate shock of the crash must have evaporated, because suddenly frantic shouting was heard.   

“Movement in the car,” Clint warned. 

Natasha got to her feet. Time to get his show on the road. She leaned out from behind her cover and fired over the snow bank. Both of the SUV’s tail lights went out, leaving the area behind it in darkness. All she needed to do now was wait until Clint got their attention, drew it away from her, then use the cover of dark to get up close and personal. As she ducked back into cover, she caught a glimpse of one of the SUV's headlights exploding at the front, sending a glittering shower of plastic and metal fragments into the air. The other light meet the same fate and the bridge fell into total darkness again.  

“I’m coming in on the left," Clint said. " _Your_ left. Watch the crossfire, please.” 

She started creeping down the outside of the bridge towards the abutment. “Jesus. You’re still upset about that?” She didn’t have to keep her voice down with the horn still going. “I said I was sorry. And besides, it wasn’t even close.”

“The hole two inches from my ear says otherwise.” 

“Exactly, it was two inches. That’s not close.”

“Right,” Clint huffed. “Not close.”

She followed the slope down the outside of the bridge. Clint would go high, scaling the metal structure of the bridge. She would go low and make use of the outside of the railing to get close. She holstered her gun and reached overhead to grip the massive horizontal girder that ran under the bridge. The freezing metal offered a good grip, so she pulled herself up by her arms before swinging her leg sideways, hooking it around the girder. “Are you ever going to let it go?”

“No. Never. It’ll be on my headstone. Here lies the amazing Hawkeye. Who was almost shot dead by his partner.”

The exchange was relaxed, but it was an auto-pilot thing for both of them, their full attention was on the job at hand. “If you’d stayed where you were supposed to,” she grunted as climbed all the way up onto the metal beam, “it wouldn’t have been an issue.”

“Nice,” Clint drawled. “Blame the guy who almost got smoked by friendly fire.”

The metal was wide and solid, so balancing on it wasn't an issue, but it was icy and she had only taken a few steps when her boot slipped sharply. She managed to stay on her feet by the thinnest of margins.

“Widow?” The light tone in Clint’s voice was suddenly gone. “You okay?”

She scowled when she realized she must have made some small noise under her breath. Careless. Both the noise and the close call. She glanced down at the darkness behind her. It wasn’t a huge drop; fifteen feet to water level according to the mechanical drawings, but it was more than enough to cause serious injuries. Especially when what she would be landing on if she fell wasn’t water - which would be painful enough - but ice. She glared at the girder and scuffed her boot lightly over the surface, testing the grip. It wasn’t great, but she could handle it. Clint wasn’t the only one proficient in scaling precarious structures.

She started inching forward again. “I’m fine. Approaching the target from below. What’s your position?” 

“Reaching the bridge now.”  

She carefully made her way along the underside of the bridge. When she estimated she was where she wanted to be, she climbed up past the overhang and up to road level again. She got herself situated on the outside of the bridge railing, crouched down on the narrow ledge with one arm wrapped around a rail post. Peering through an opening she saw the rear of the SUV. And beyond it, she saw movement at the far side of the bridge. The moonlight was just enough for her to see Clint climb up on the railing. He started making his way soundlessly towards the car, moving from one bridge support member to the next, stopping a few seconds behind each before moving again.    

“You in position?” Clint asked.

“Waiting for you. As usual.”

She pulled herself up from her crouch and slipped over the outer railing at the rear of the car. She was making her way over the lower crash barrier when everything went to hell. She heard the car door open and a moment later someone fired from within the car, the muzzle flash bright in the darkness. Clint twisted sharply, backtracking to find cover behind the girder he’d just passed, but the move must have been just a little too sudden on the icy metal, because halfway through the turn he staggered and his arms shot out, grabbing desperately for a hold that wasn’t there. Then he was gone.

 _Gone_. 

Natasha’s heart pounded in her chest as she fired her gun into the back of the car, aiming at the rear door where the shooter must have been located. Her instinct told her to keep firing, to spray the rest of the backseat with bullets and do as much damage as possible, but there was still the small risk of a child being in there, and she restrained herself at the last moment. She crouched down, using the bulky SUV as cover between herself and the guns inside it.

“Hawkeye? Status?” 

No answer.

She wrenched one of the small shock grenades from her pocket. Dammit. She should have warned him, should have told him the metal was icy. She pulled the grenade pin and started counting silently. Her eyes cut back to the railing where Clint had slipped and lost his footing. _Come on, Barton_. She willed him to climb back up, pissed off and embarrassed, but there was just the naked skeleton of the bridge, the blackness behind it. Every cell in her wanted to drop the job at hand and race to the railing, but the risk of taking a bullet to the back if she did was too high.

She lobbed the grenade across the roof of the car. She faintly heard it bouncing off the hood over the sound of the horn. Crouching down, she squeezed her eyes shut to keep the blinding phosphor flash from messing up her night vision. A moment later the grenade exploded and she took off in a sprint towards the back of the car. She took a running leap up on the rear bumper, using it as a stepping stone to get on top of the SUV. Her boots thudded against the roof as she crossed it in two long steps. 

Gato was the one in Fuller’s regular entourage who posed the greatest danger, so she needed to take him out first. She slid to her knees without slowing down and fired through roof. Momentum carried her forward over the edge onto the windshield, and she twisted as she slid down the glass, coming face to face with the interior of the car. Just as Clint had reported, Gato had taken cover in the footwell, but he wasn’t a threat any longer; her bullets had found their mark. He was slumped over the seat, face down, either dead or gravely injured. With another two rapid rounds through the windshield Natasha made sure she knew which one it was.

She shoved away from the cracked windshield and rolled off the hood, coming to a low crouch in front of the radiator. “Hawkeye?” she tried again. “Do you copy?”   

Still no answer.

Dammit. She had to get to him fast, now, immediately, _yesterday_ , but she still had the people in the back of the SUV to deal with. She didn’t know how many they were, if it was just Fuller or more of his security team. Or if his daughter was with him. She quickly went through the past seconds in her head. She had fired three bullets at the shooter in the back, five at Gato, which meant she had eleven left in the magazine. She was usually much more economical, but without any visual cues and with zero time for refinement she had gone in guns blazing. Literally.

She crab-walked along the front of the car, pausing at the shot-out headlight on the driver’s side. She raised her gun and took a quick look around the corner down the length of the car. Clear. She crept forward. The side mirror had broken off in the crash and now hung down the side of the door, attached only by electrical wires. She wrenched it off and grabbed the largest piece of mirror, then braced her boot against the tire behind her. On the silent count of three she kicked off, propelling herself into a roll towards the rear of the car. No bullets came tearing through the car door as she dived past it, and she came to a stop by the rear tire. She took two deep, centering breaths before twisting and slamming the butt of her gun into the rear door window. A frightened shriek was heard as the tempered glass disintegrated into a thousand small, blunt shards. The sound had been the panicked yelp of an adult male. Not a child.

She wiped the mirror against her leg to get rid of the snow, then reached up and angled it to get a glimpse of the backseat, but it was too dark to see anything. She reached for the door handle and pulled the door open a crack. The interior dome light came on. In the mirror she saw Fuller on the floor, wedged behind the front passenger seat and pulling at the door, but the car was too close to the barrier for anyone to get out that way. His fingers were wrapped in a white-knuckle grip around his phone, and eyes wide and terrified as he looked at her over his shoulder. Next to him was a child’s booster seat. Empty. No child in the car. No one else, either, and that was all she needed to know.

She shoved to her feet and fired through the broken rear window, not even waiting until Fuller slumped over before moving to the driver’s door and wrenching it open. She wrestled the driver off the steering wheel and the blaring horn cut off. Then she was flat out running.

She reached the spot where Clint had disappeared, skidding the last few feet and ending up half-hanging over the side rail as she scanned the darkness below the bridge. She called his name, clinging to the hope that he somehow had managed to catch himself and was hanging onto something on the outside, that his ear piece had been knocked out and that’s why he wasn’t answering.

But he wasn’t hanging on. Her stomach tightened sickly when her eyes found the unmoving shape on the dark ice directly below her. She shoved away from the railing and ran towards the end of the bridge. Her boots slipped on the snow and ice as she took the turn too fast. She swore sharply, somehow managing to stay mostly upright. Using hands and knees and feet, she scrambled up and over the snow bank. The slope towards the river was perilously steep, and as she skidded down she grabbed for shrubbery and trees to stay on her feet. She tried to keep the rising worry at bay. Clint knew better than most how to minimize the damage of a fall, how to land and roll, but there had been nothing controlled about the way he’d gone over the edge.

The river bank finally gave way to the river and she pushed through the last of the dense, snow-covered shrubbery. The bridge had been built where the water went from wide and deep to narrow and significantly shallower, resulting in the raging whitewater rapid that emerged from the ice no more than a few feet downstream. Luckily Clint had gone over the edge on the upstream side, but he lay uncomfortably close to the boundary region between the dark ice and the even darker water.

Clint had been almost halfway across the bridge when he’d slipped and fallen. She eyed the distance between them, then started forward as fast as she dared. It was slow going, because every few steps she stopped and tapped her boot lightly on the ice, checking the strength. In this climate and at this time of year, a more slow-flowing body of water would be solidly iced over, but even before this river transformed into a turbulent rapid it ran fast, so she couldn't trust the integrity of the ice.

She was halfway when a low, wavering groan made her look up. Clint was still in the same position, still curled up on his side, facing away from her, but the sound had definitely come from him.

“Clint?"

This time she got an answer in the form of another wordless groan.

"Hang on. I'm coming. Just hang on."

She started moving faster, but just a few steps later she felt a sudden change in the ice, a fractional give under her boots. She froze as it flexed minutely under her. A low, crunching sound from up ahead made her attention snap back to Clint. He shifted and raised his head an inch. The ice around him gave another sound of warning.

“No, stop,” she told him. “Don’t move.” She carefully got down on her front to distribute her weight more evenly across the ice, then started dragging herself forward. As she crawled she kept her eyes on him. A strange sheen rippled in the darkness around him. Water on the ice, she realized. It must have fractured when he hit. It was a miracle he hadn’t gone straight through. “Listen to me. You need to stay absolutely still. You hear?” The ice grew softer and more porous under her the further she got. “I’m not sure how close I can get, but I’m going to—“

With a groan Clint rolled slowly from his side to his front and braced his forearms on the ice. He made a sound of pain as he lifted his upper body a fraction. There was something clumsy and dazed about his movements, but Natasha still felt half a second of relief that he was in good enough shape to move. It vanished abruptly when he started pushing himself up.   

“No! Clint, don't move!”

He paused, but the words must not have registered, because he mumbled something and resumed his sluggish attempt to get to his hands and knees. 

“Lie down," she urged, desperate to get through to him. "Lie down. It won't hold, it will—” 

The ice collapsed. Clint dropped into the water with a splash and disappeared under the black surface, his yelp abruptly cut off. He reappeared a moment later, gasping and flailing, grabbing desperately for the crumbling ice edge. It took everything Natasha had to not throw caution to the wind and just get to him and pull him out, but one of them in the freezing water was bad enough, both of them would be a death sentence, so she rolled to her back, pulled the zipper down and tried to get her jacket off as quickly as possible.

“Hold on,” she called over her shoulder as she worked. 

She heard him try to say something, but he was gasping uncontrollably, hyperventilating from the shock of going into the freezing water. She swore as her uncooperative jacket wouldn’t come off fast enough. She finally managed to get out of it and rolled back to her stomach just in time to watch him try to heave himself up out of the water, but the weakened edge wouldn’t support his weight and the ice broke under him, dropping him back into the freezing water again. He resurfaced and grabbed desperately at the broken rim of the ice, coughing and wheezing, a bright look of panic in his eyes.

"Fuck," he gasped. His fingers scratched across the ice surface, searching for a better grip. “The current,” he managed to get out. “The current almost dragged me under.”

She pulled herself a little closer, just enough for the jacket to reach when she slid it across the ice like a makeshift rope. The sleeve landed just to the side of him. “Take it.”

He didn't need much encouragement and grabbed on with both hands. He started pulling himself out of the freezing water, and Natasha swore as she started sliding towards him and the black hole in the ice. She twisted, scrabbling across the surface for something to grab, for something to stop her from joining him in the water, but she found nothing and she kept sliding. Clint must have seen what was happening, because he abruptly let go and sank back into the water. She shimmied backwards on her stomach, away from the edge.

He folded his arm in front of him and put his head down. “Fuck,” he gasped, his jagged breath rising in white puffs around his head.    

She repositioned herself and slid the sleeve close again. They had to try again, because thirty-four degree water was merciless, and she knew it was only a matter of minutes before he would be too compromised to aid in his own rescue. "Again,” she urged. "Try again."   

He shook his head jerkily without lifting it. “I’ll pull you down.”

“You have to get out of the water. _Now_. And this is the way.”

He looked up at her, blinking water from his eyes. “Rope,” he panted. “There’s a rope in the car.”

Yes, there was a rope in their car. But it was parked over a mile away, hidden from view on an old logging road. She couldn’t leave him here; the thought of coming back to a dark hole in the ice with him nowhere to be seen was too horrible. Especially when they had a perfectly good alternative right here. She repositioned the jacket next to him. “Try again.”

He ignored it and started to pull himself up on his own again.

“Sideways,” she told him. “Go at it sideways.”  

He kicked his legs to get himself a little more horizontal in the water, then tried to lift his leg onto the edge, but even this proved too much for the compromised ice. He made a desperate sound as it broke again. He managed to keep his head above the water this time, but now that she was looking for it, she saw how the current tugged at him, tried to twist him in under the ice.

She suddenly realized there was another way to get him out of the water. “Your knife! Use your knife as an anchor to pull yourself out.”

He clung to the edge, his eyes tightly shut. Water glittered in the moonlight as it dripped from him. “Yeah. Yeah, that’ll work.” She watched him take two deep, shuddering breaths before he twisted and reached down into the fast-flowing, black water for the knife strapped to his ankle.

“Don’t drop it,” she warned when Clint kept fumbling under the water. His fingers would already be going numb, dexterity the first casualty to the freezing cold. 

It felt like forever, but probably was no more than five seconds before he wrenched his arm up in a spray of water, knife in hand. He drove it into the water-sick ice in front of him and Natasha held her breath, afraid that the ice would already be too weakened, that the knife would break it up even more. But Clint had reached as far from the crumbling edge as he could and it held.

“Jesus fuck,” he gasped, hanging on to the knife with both hands. He gave a few kicks with his legs, black water splashing around his boots, and positioned himself in the water again. With a shivery grunt he started dragging himself forward onto the ice. It flexed and dipped an inch, water sluicing up over it. He stopped, his chest heaving. When the ice continued to hold, he pulled himself up another few inches. He tried to bring his leg up over the edge, but aborted the move almost immediately. “Need to get further up,” he panted.  

She nodded. He would have to reposition the knife to get further, so she slid the jacket towards him again. “Grab it. Hold on, that way you won’t slide back into the water.”

While keeping one hand still wrapped around the knife, he fumbled for the sleeve. With a twist of his wrist he looped it around his hand. She shifted and tried to find a position that would give her more traction against the ice, because even if he didn’t actively use the jacket to get himself up, this would be dicey. Gravity and the flowing water would try to drag him back down the moment he pulled the knife out.

Clint cautiously pulled at the makeshift tether, testing it, and Natasha braced her arms against the ice. She could feel how close she was to the point where the fickle seesaw between friction and force would tip over in the wrong direction.

“Ready?” he asked hoarsely.

“Ready.”  

He jerked the knife from the ice, and immediately started to slide back into the water, dragging Natasha with him. But only for a second, then he lunged forward and stabbed the knife into the ice again, further away from the edge. He dropped the jacket, desperately clutching the hilt with both hands. He stayed here for a few seconds, then started pulling himself forward.

“Go at it sideways,” she reminded him.  

He tried, but it took three attempts to get his right leg out of the water and onto the ice next to him. Finally he managed and he dragged himself further up, most of him now out of the water. Natasha reached for him, stretched as far as she could. He did the same, reached a shaking hand towards hers, but he was still too far away.

“Come on, you’re almost there,” she encouraged. “Just a little further.” 

He kept moving. He did everything right, he stayed flat, he spread his weight, and he was almost there, almost close enough for Natasha to reach him when the ice suddenly cracked and groaned. His head snapped up sharply and his eyes, wide and alarmed, locked with hers. For a split second it seemed like the ice was hesitating, like it hadn’t made up its mind whether to hold or break, but then it gave another a wet crunch. Clint heaved himself forward as it disintegrated under him, reaching desperately for her, but he was still too far away and his wet hand brushed uselessly against the tips of her fingers. Then he was in the water again.  _Under_ the water again.

And this time he didn’t resurface.   


	2. Chapter 2

Natasha scrambled back, away from the widening hole. Freezing water sloshed onto the sagging ice and over her hands, soaking into her clothes, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought she would join Clint in the freezing water. She twisted sharply on the ice and log rolled herself toward safety. As she moved, she tried to keep the hole in view, waiting for him to reappear, but seconds passed and he didn’t. _He didn’t._ The current, she thought, her mind echoing the panic she’d heard in his voice when he told her how it pulled at him. The current must have swept him under the ice.

The further away she got, the more solid the ice felt, but she didn't dare get up until she was right at the shore.

She had to go after him. She had to follow the river downstream and find him, but as she scanned the dark water she realized with a sinking sensation that she would have to climb back up to the bridge and down the other side, because the abutment extended into the river and the rapids flowed free around it. There was no way for her to skirt around it down here without going into the water.   

Going back up the slope wasn’t as precarious as going down, but the angle was steep and it was slow going. She was breathing hard when she finally pulled herself up the last few feet and climbed back over the snow bank. She pausing only to listen for any cars approaching, but she heard nothing. Hopefully the traffic would be exactly as sparse as the statistic intel had indicated. It had been one of the reasons they had chosen the location, but statistics were just that, statistics - nothing but aggregated likelihoods and probabilities. Someone might decide to take a late-night drive and discover Fuller anytime. But there was nothing she could do about that. All she could do was to find Clint as soon as possible and get out of the area.

She crossed the road and started down the other side. Urgency overrode any last trace of caution, and by the time she reached the river her hands were scraped bloody from gripping after icy rocks and rough branches while trying to stay on her feet.

She followed the shoreline downstream, wading through the near knee-deep snow as fast as she could. Every few seconds she called his name, but the river was louder on this side, and all she heard was the rushing roar of the water. It was a powerful, primal sound that had always appealed to her, but now it just added to the tightness that was building inside. The sound meant danger, meant sharp rocks and violent water. It meant eddies and currents that could pull a body under the surface and trap it there for hours, days, weeks. She pushed those thoughts away. Clint would make it. He would. He wouldn’t drown or get his head smashed open on the thousands of rocks above and below the surface. She would find him and get him to safety, get him dry and warm. He might be hurt, but he’d be alive. Anything else just wasn’t an option.   

Despite being winter-bare, the vegetation nearest the frozen waterline was dense and progress was slow and difficult. A stopwatch was running in her head - t minus zero the moment Clint had gone into the water - and the minutes were ticking away far too quickly.

She called his name again, pausing for a moment to listen, her hand braced against a tree. She coughed drily. Her lungs and airways ached, protesting the combination of heavy exertion and freezing air, but despite the effort of running through the deep snow, she was trembling from the cold. It had been bad before, but with her jacket disappearing into the river and her shirt wet, it had rapidly escalated to miserable. No matter how bad it was, she knew it was nothing - _nothing_ \- compared to how Clint must feel.

The rapids wasn't long, and soon the river quieted down, its rage abating as it was allowed to go deeper and wider again. Its rumble still dominated the forest around her, but the notes softened the further from the bridge she got. She kept calling his name. When her timer passed ten minutes desperation began to seep in. If he’d made it through the rapids alive and conscious, he should’ve made it to shore by now, shouldn’t he? She did a full three-sixty degree turn and scanned every direction. What if she’d missed him? What if he was lying unconscious somewhere and she’d passed just feet away from him, not spotting him in the darkness? What if he’d made landfall on the other side? 

She suddenly spotted something in the darkness that made her stop in her track; a sharp, ragged gash that bisected the snow ahead. Someone or something had passed here.

Let it be Clint, she prayed as she hurried forward. Please, let it be him and not a deer or some other animal. Relief crashed in as she closed in on the disturbed snow. It was footprints, fresh footprints, leading away from the river. She followed them, trying to collect as much information about his state as possible from what she could see. The snow was pockmarked all along, but it was too dark to see if it was just water dripping off him, or if he was bleeding too. The footprints were weaving and uneven, the path anything but straight. A short distance on, she could tell he’d fallen, had crawled through the snow on his hands and knees before getting to his feet again.

Her eyes first skated right over him, making him out to be just another dark shadow next to a massive fallen tree, but something about it made her attention stutter and snap back to it.   

When she reached him, she dropped to her knees and cupped his face. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was curled up tightly, arms and legs pulled to his body, his chin tucked close against his chest. Full-body shivers ran through him.

“Hey,” she panted. She patted his cheek. His skin was wet and horrifyingly cold. “Hey, wake up.”

“Natasha?” His teeth were chattering so hard her name was barely recognizable.

"Yeah,” she said, her voice catching on the massive relief. “Yeah, it’s me.”    

She looked him over as best she could in the darkness, checking for obvious injuries. She could see water still dripped freely from him, and she thought she could make out a darker trail that seemed to stem from somewhere above his ear. She turned his head a little to identify where the blood was coming from, but it was too dark. It didn’t look like it was bleeding much at the moment, but the blood vessels were constricted by the cold and she knew it would likely start to bleed more once he warmed up. She ran her hands down what she could reach of his arms and legs. His wet clothes were stiff, encrusted with icy snow that had stuck to him when he'd fallen. She finished her quick examination, relieved when she didn’t find any obviously broken bones.

“Can you get up?"

“Cold.” He tried to curl up even more.

“I know. I’ll get you somewhere warm,” she promised, “but we have to go.”

She draped his arm over her shoulder and dragged him up. He staggered heavily and she wrapped her arm around his waist to keep him on his feet. He half-turned and pressed himself against her side, grasping for any scrap of body heat she could share. Ice water seeped through her clothes at every point of contact between them and she clenched her teeth against the hiss that wanted to escape. 

Moving with Clint clinging to her like that was awkward, but she managed. With the river at their backs and the terrain firmly memorized from hours spent studying maps, she led them toward the logging road that ran parallel to the river, half a mile away. It would be faster to follow her own tracks back to the bridge and then follow the main road to the logging road, but the last thing she wanted was for someone to drive by and stop to ask if they needed help. Not with the dead bodies waiting to be discovered on the bridge and Clint soaking wet, looking like death.  

It was slow going. Clint’s staggering grew worse with every passing minute, what little coordination he had left was fading fast. It was becoming increasingly clear that remaining upright would soon be beyond him. She would follow him down the slippery slope of hypothermia soon enough, her own increasingly wet clothes would make sure of that. The only saving grace was that she had more time than he did, and she would use every minute of that to get him somewhere warm.

She shifted her grip around his waist, tried to find a better one. She couldn't feel the stinging scrapes on her hands any longer, the nerves had shut down their normal pain responses in favor of the deep, grueling ache caused by the cold. She was guiding Clint around a fallen tree when her boot slipped on something under the snow and she stumbled heavily, her own coordination starting to fall victim to the cold. She managed to stay on her feet, but the unexpected shift in balance was all it took for Clint to go down. His full weight proved too much for her and she went to her knees with him.

The trees towered dark and tall above them, and this far from the river, the whisper of the wind could be heard over their ragged breathing. Clint let his forehead drop against her shoulder. His hair, already stiff with forming ice, brushed against the side of her jaw. He was shaking uncontrollably against her.  

“How far?” he panted. 

She tightened her arm around him and pressed him close, tried to share some of her own waning body heat. It didn't feel like she had any left. "Not long now," she said, her own teeth chattering almost as much as his. She hoped desperately she was right.

They shouldn't be too far away from the car now. Provided she hadn’t led them seriously off course in the darkness. Her sense of direction was impeccable, and the murmur of the river behind them was a trustworthy reference, but with Clint literally freezing to death in her arms, this was not the time to risk anything. She grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away from his chest. Her fingers felt wooden and clumsy as she pushed the wet sleeve up and tapped his watch, bringing up the digital compass. She compared it with her internal one and verified that they were heading in the right direction. She let go of his wrist and he immediately tucked his hand back close to his body.

She got her feet under herself and grabbed his arms, but he resisted moving. “Up," she ordered. She couldn’t afford to let him rest, not now. "Come on, get up.”  

He tried, but even with Natasha's assistance he only got halfway before he lost his balance and his legs folded under him again. Frustration and desperation colored the wordless sound he made when he slumped back into the snow. "Jesus fuck," he moaned.

It took another two failed attempts to get him up, but finally they were moving again.

She'd been right about the distance, and it wasn't long until they finally reached the small logging road. They came out a just hundred yards beyond the car, and Natasha steered Clint toward it. Soon they’d be inside it. They would be warm. _Warm_. She felt like crying from wanting it so much. As she guided him down the road, she realized it wasn't just the cold and the difficult terrain that made Clint stagger; he was limping heavily.

"Status, Barton. What’s the damage?" 

"Dunno," he mumbled. "Hurts. Everything hurts." His words were starting to acquire a weirdly rounded quality. Enunciation was slipping out of his grasp.   

She debated whether or not she should strip him out of his wet clothes right there by the side of the road. Despite the cold it might be better to get him out of them. The problem was that there wasn’t even a blanket in the car; they’d only brought what they needed for the job. The rest of their things, including their bags with spare sets of clothes, were waiting in a nice, toasty parking garage forty-five miles away.

She dragged Clint to the car and propped him up against the side of it. No matter what she did it would be miserable for him, so she made the decision to leave him in his wet clothes for now. They needed to put distance between themselves and the dead people on the bridge. It would be okay. She would crank up the heat in the car and Clint could start getting out of his clothes while she was driving. If she had to, she could pull over and help him once they’d put a few miles behind them.

Her hand went to get the car key from her pocket, but she froze in mid-motion. For a brief moment the bitter night had nothing on the chill that went through her, because the key had been in her jacket. The one that had gone into the river with Clint, and gone were the days when something as easy as short-circuiting the starter motor would get a car running. Most modern cars were equipped with immobilizer systems that exchanged and compared encrypted electronic signatures with the ones in the key. Without the correct key the car wouldn’t start, no matter which wires you short-circuited.

A second later it hit her. She’d had the key when they left the car, but had handed it to Clint before they split up. Relief washed through her.

"Clint, where’s the car key?" When he didn't answer she grabbed his shoulder and shook him. "The key!”

He slowly began fumbling with the zipper on his jacket, but she pushed his shaking hands away. He was getting nowhere; his fingers were stiff beyond use and she didn’t have time to wait. She pulled his zipper down. His jacket made a rough, scratchy sound as she pushed it open. Her fingers found the key fob in an inside pocket and she pulled it out. The doors unlocked with a distinct click and she ushered him to the front passenger seat. Seconds later she was in the driver’s seat and started the car. As the engine came to life, the headlights flooded the dark forestscape with cold light. She stabbed aggressively at the heater button until the display told her it was at max.   

Clint had hunched over in his seat, stuffed his hands into his armpits. “Heat,” he groaned. “Now.”

She tried to suppress her own shivering, but it was getting very hard. “It’s coming. It will just take a few minutes for the car to get warm.” She located the fan control and turned it down to just about zero. Blowing freezing air at him right now would be a very bad idea. She put her hand over the vent in the center panel. When she was satisfied that no more than a trickle of air was coming through, she started working her long-sleeved shirt up and over her head. The wet fabric stuck and clung to her, and God, she really didn’t want take it off, didn’t want to leave her thin undershirt as the only barrier against the bitter cold. She clenched her teeth and finally managed to get it off. She turned it over to get access to the relatively dry back. "Here," she said and pushed it into his hands. "Start getting dry."  

Clint clumsily started rubbing her shirt over his face and hair, and she put the car in gear. She took them out onto the larger road, turning away from the bridge. Without looking she reached into the center console. Her trembling fingers closed on the energy bar that had been left over from their trip there. Right now Clint needed all the energy he could get to warm up. Keeping one hand on the cold steering wheel, she pulled the wrapper open with her teeth. She spat out the piece that came off and pulled the wrapper down before nudging Clint with it.

“Eat.”

His ice cold fingers fumbled over hers, so she kept a hold of the bar until she was sure he had a good grip.

They didn’t meet any cars, and a few miles down the road she turned onto a smaller road. She drove a few miles, then turned back onto a slightly larger one. She knew exactly where she was going; they had done a number of recon runs over the past thirty-six hours in preparation for the job, and their escape routes had been mapped out in detail.

She tilted her head in Clint’s direction. His eyes were closed. He was still hugging himself, clutching the energy bar to his chest. She could see he hadn't eaten anything. “You doing okay there?” She knew there was preciously little that was ‘okay’ about him right now, but she wanted to keep him talking.  

“No,” he mumbled.

“What do you say about a trip somewhere warm when we get back?" She put her fingers to the vent again. The air coming through was a little warmer, but the car was still cold enough that her breath clouded in the low light of the instrument panel. "Marco Island maybe? I’d suggest Thailand, but the flight is too long for just a few days.”

She hadn't finished speaking when Clint dropped the energy bar and groped blindly for the door handle. “Stop," he groaned. "Nat, stop.”

She pulled over to the side of the road. He tumbled out onto his hands and knees before the car had even stopped rolling. Natasha got out to the sound of him throwing up. A lot of water, she noted as she rounded the front of the car to the passenger side. In the best of worlds this would just be his body ridding itself of what he had swallowed in the river, but judging from how she’d found him, he had hit the ice hard when he fell and his head had probably taken part of that impact. Then there was the ride down the rapids and the blood that still tricked from his head. It would be a miracle if he wasn't concussed.

She grabbed the back of his wet jacket and held him up when his shaking arms threatened to give out. Still holding on, she crouched down next to him and tried to get a better look at his eyes to guage his state, but they were screwed shut. “Look at me,” she said, but he hunched down further. “Come on, look at me. What’s the damage?”    

He shook his head and pressed an unsteady hand against his head with a moan. “Head hurts.” Natasha tightened her grip on his jacket when he started listing.

She nudged his hand away from his head and quickly ran her fingers through his hair, starting at the base of his skull. She dragged them up over the crown of his head, then down the sides, feeling for contusions and bumps hiding beneath the shaggy spikes. He had a sizable lump on the right side of his head, just behind his ear. She probed it lightly with her fingers and his breath hitched. He made a clumsy grab for her wrist, but she blocked him and continued her examination.

She was almost done when he pitched forward and threw up again. Natasha slid her hand to the back of his neck. She kept it there, offering a grounding point, a reminder that even as miserable as he was, as cold and wet and hurting, he wasn’t alone.

While she waited, she scanned the dark winter road behind and in front of the idling car. No lights or houses in sight. No cars approaching from either direction. No sirens in the distance yet. She knew it was just a matter of time before the latter changed, and she would very much like to be further away when it did. She looked down when the heaving stopped.  

Natasha had to make use of the car door to get to her feet, she felt stiff and clumsy from the cold. “Come on, we have to go.” She kept her hand on the car as she leaned down and slipped her arm under his. 

He coughed wetly. "Not sure I’m done.”

“Puke in the car if you have to. We have to get you out of the cold.”

"Gross," he mumbled, but allowed her to help him up and into the car again.

She got back behind the wheel and did a quick U-turn. She needed to revise her strategy, needed to find somewhere close by where they could stay for a few hours, just long enough for Clint to get his temperature back up, because this wasn’t working.

She doubled back half a mile and turned onto a road they had passed. Research had told them there was nothing but a few hunting cabins out this way, and she figured that was their best bet right now. She glanced over and saw that his eyes were closed again.

"Talk to me. How are you doing?" 

"Everything hurts,” he mumbled hoarsely.   

“Specifics, Barton. _What_ hurts?”

Instead of answering he groaned and put his head between his knees. He retched and the sound of wetness splattering onto the floor was heard.

“I’m finding us somewhere to hole up for a while,” she told him as she navigated the increasingly narrow road. “We’ll get you warm.”

Clint stayed bent over and made an exhausted, shivery sound into the darkness between his boots. 

Reaching out, she checked the heaters again. They were finally, _finally_ producing warm air. She cranked the fans up a little, but turned the vents in the center of the dash safely away from Clint. Even with the air warming up, too much airflow on him when he was still in wet clothes would only cause faster evaporation, drawing more body heat from his already sorely reduced reserves.

She reached across Clint’s still hunched over form, trying get to the vent on the far side of him, but it was too far. She poked his arm. “Turn the vent away from yourself. Toward the window.”

He stayed bent over, but pawed blindly at the glove compartment by his head. He was nowhere near the vent.

“Further to the right.”  

"What?"

“The right. Further to the right.”

His shaking hand stopped fumbling at the panel. He turned his head and squinted up at her. “What?”   

Natasha flexed her fingers around the steering wheel. They definitely needed to find somewhere to stop. Clint’s cognitive functions were starting to go off-line.

A snowed-over driveway appeared in the dark, and she slowed down to a crawl as she passed it. She could just about see the outlines of the cabin at the far end. She pulled over and killed the engine. "Stay here. I'm going to do some recon. I’ll be right back."  

He didn't uncurl from his hunched over position, but he nodded, so she got out and closed the door quickly behind her. She did a quick detour around the trunk of the car to retrieve the spare flashlight, then doubled back toward the driveway. She shined the light up the long, narrow driveway. The snow was untouched. No tire tracks. No footprints. Hopefully that meant the cabin was empty.

It was small and weather-beaten. A porch lined the front, its roof sagging slightly in the middle. It adding to the understated feeling of neglect that wrapped around the entire place. As she approached quietly she hoped it was another sign it wasn’t occupied. No lights were seen. No car stood parked around the far side. Natasha skirted around to the back and found a door and a single small window facing the rear of the property. She peered through the window. A small room. A rustic bunk bed was propped against the far wall, and she tensed for a moment before her brain caught up to the fact that the dark shape on the lower bunk wasn’t a person. It was a balled-up blanket, tossed haphazardly on the naked mattress.

A blanket. And a bed. In a few minutes she and Clint could be in there, curled up under that blanket, maybe under multiple blankets, and God, she wanted to break the window and crawl inside right now, she was so _cold_. But before that could happen she needed to secure the rest of the cabin, and she needed to get Clint, so she moved on to the door. She had to rise up on her toes to look through the dusty glass panel. Shadows moved inside as she shined the light in a slow arc across the room. The open space stretched all the way to the front of the cabin, opening up to two rooms on the left. The walls were covered with wood panels, and a number of deer antlers had been mounted over the couch by the wall to her right. A low coffee table was littered with empty beer bottles that glittered dully as the light passed over them. No one in there, either.

The closest adjoining door led to the small bedroom she’d just surveyed, the other to what she guessed was a kitchen, because she spotted the corner of a table and a chair through the doorway. She rounded the cabin and took a closer look through the side window. It was indeed a kitchen, and it, too, was empty.

She hurried back to the car. When she got there, she saw that Clint hadn't moved an inch, he was still hunched over. She got in, reversed the car and took them up the driveway to the cabin. She parked off to the side, as far away from the road as she could. The tire tracks would be a dead giveaway in case someone who knew this cabin was supposed to be empty came around, but it couldn’t be helped. Leaving the car by the side of the road would be even more conspicuous.      

She rounded the car and opened Clint’s door. She grabbed his feet and pulled them out the car. He mumbled something that had a decidedly unflattering ring to it, but his voice was too slurred to make out the words.

“I’ve got something much better than this old car lined up,” she promised as she reached inside and draped his arm over her shoulder. “A bed. And warm, dry blankets.”

She got him up and dragged him toward the cabin. He was hanging heavily off her, hardly taking any of his own weight, and she could feel he wasn’t shaking continuously any longer. The deep, violent tremors were coming in waves, separated by long seconds of nothing. She tightened her grip around him. It wasn’t improvement. It was the opposite of improvement. He had reached the point where he was unable to sustain even this most primal attempt at generating heat. A few minutes in a moderately warm car hadn't made a dent; his body was shutting down.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this was going to be a three part piece. And it is. Kinda. As long as you agree that this part is 3a and the next one 3b. 
> 
> *everyone who knows Milly groans, because they know it takes approximately ten gazillion years for her to write a chapter these days* 
> 
> No, fear not! Both 3a and 3b are DONE and I will post 3b (also known as chapter 4) in about 30s when I'm done posting this one!

God, she was so cold; the few minutes in the car had just reminded her body of exactly how miserable she was, how tired she was, and Clint was clinging to her, heavy, he was so heavy. She gritted her teeth. Come on, Romanoff. Another ten steps. Get the door open. Get inside. Get him out of his clothes. Dry him off. Get him into bed and under that blanket she'd spotted. Then she could get herself under that blanket _with_ him, and she’d finally be warm. She'd be warm and he'd be warm, and they’d be okay. Just a few more steps.  

It was a struggle dragging Clint through the snow and keeping him upright, and when she reached the door, she was breathing hard. She needed both hands to work the door, so propped him up against the wall. His icy jacket made a scratchy sound against the wood siding as he started sliding down.

She grabbed his arm. “No, don't sit. We’re almost there.”

He twisted away from her and slumped down heavily in the snow. He pulled his knees close, hunched over them. “Leave me alone,” he groaned when she pulled at him to get up. His words were disintegrating further, slurring starting to overtake the stuttering and the chattering teeth.   

Natasha cursed under her breath and let go of him when he continued to resist. Far too cold for any kind of finesse, she drove her elbow through one of the small glass panes on the door. Careful of the razor-sharp edges, she reached inside and unlocked it. When she grabbed Clint again, she didn’t give him a choice. It was difficult, he was heavy and uncooperative, but she finally managed to get him to his feet and hauled him across the threshold, a trail of snow following them inside.

The cold darkness smelled like stale dust and unused space. She tried the light switch next to the door. Nothing happened. There was power, she knew that much, because even though the air wasn’t warm, it was definitely warmer than outside, so whoever owned the cabin probably kept it just warm enough to keep the water pipes from freezing. She was shining the flashlight around the room, trying to spot the heat sources she knew had to be there when she felt Clint start to slide down again.

“Stay on your feet,” she snapped and tightened her grip around his waist. She knew he was exhausted, _beyond_ exhausted, but so was she, and she was nearing the point where she didn't know if she’d be able to get him back up if he sat down again.

He made a sound of protest as she dragged him into the bedroom and nudged the door closed behind them, hoping the door would provide some insulation against the cold already invading the other room through the broken window. Clint took a staggering step towards the bed.

She held him back. “You need to get out of your clothes and get dry before you get under the blankets.”

She steadied him as he stumbled dangerously. He wasn’t going to remain on his feet for very much longer. She couldn’t let him sit on the bed, couldn’t let him get it wet, but there was nothing else to sit on, and she needed to go look for more blankets, for towels, for anything that would help him get dry and warm. A space heater would be a dream.

Rather than letting him fall, she reluctantly lowered him to the floor. “Start undressing. I’ll be right back."

Her legs were stiff from the cold, her body felt weirdly off center as she returned to the outer room and started searching. There was nothing but dust on the shelves in the first of the two closets. All she found in the second one was a single, thread-bare towel. No extra blankets. No dry clothes. The small kitchen held nothing of use, either, except for a small radiator by the window, turned almost all the way down, and she cranked it up to max. She didn’t bother with the radiator in the outer room. The broken window meant it wouldn’t do any good. She was looking for something to cover the window with when she heard a thud from the bedroom.

She got there just as Clint reached the bed on hands and knees. He was still in his wet clothes, hadn't even taken his jacket off. She dropped the towel and squeezed in between him and the bed, blocking him. She tugged the blanket away just as he grabbed it and held it out of reach.

“No, Clint, you have to get your clothes off first.”

“I need—” He reached past her and tried clumsily to grab the blanket again.    

“Everything will get wet and then you won’t get warm. Give me three minutes to get you dry.”

“No, let me— I need to—” He tried to push her to the side, but she resisted and he slumped against her. 

“Three minutes,” she repeated firmly. She unzipped his jacket and pulled it off his shoulders, then worked his tightly fisted hands out of the sleeves. She dropped it on the floor and pulled the hems of both of his shirts up. 

"Ow," he moaned as she wrestled them up and over his head. The soggy clothes clung stubbornly to him, reluctant to come off. "Ow, _cut it out_ ," he complained from behind the fabric.

She quickly gave up on getting both shirts off at the same time and focused on the outer one. It took some force, but eventually it came off, and she started in on the undershirt, but Clint grabbed it with both hands and clumsily attempted to tug the wet fabric out of her grip. “Cut it out.”

Natasha didn’t let go, and a few seconds of tug-o-war went by.

"Let go," he growled. “Let. Go.”

She matched his angry glare for a moment, before huffing out a sharp breath. “You know what? We don’t have time for this.” She wrenched the shirt out of his hands.

The shove caught her off guard, and she toppled backward gracelessly. His eyes were locked on the bed again, on the blanket that promised warmth, and he started towards it. She scrambled to her knees and grabbed at his legs. He twisted and kicked out sharply, and it was only his poor coordination that saved her from taking a boot full-force to her face.

She scrambled back, put a few feet of distance between them and pressed her hand against her cheek. “Dammit, Barton,” she hissed. She’d avoided a head-on impact, but the edge of his boot had grazed her cheek bone and her face stung and throbbed.

Then he was moving again, and she made a grab for the back of his shirt. She wrenched him backward and to the side, unbalancing him enough to send him sprawling on his side. With a hoarse curse Clint rolled, grabbed her around the knees and took her down. She went down heavily, and then he was on her. The flashlight skidded away, caught up in their grappling, and shadows skittered over the walls as it spun.

There was no real strength behind any of his moves, no speed, no fluidity, and the moment of advantage he managed to gain was due more to his bulk than any real fighting skills. He tried to hold her down, but she grabbed his wrists, not caring that her nails dug into his skin. She wedged her knee up between them, buying some space to maneuver, and a second later she rolled them both.

She came up on top, but not before Clint had already twisted and rolled onto his front under her. He pushed up and almost managed to dislodge her, but she got her arm around his throat and caught him in a choke hold. A second later it was Clint’s turn to flip them and his full weight forced the breath out of her. Caught under him, she tightened her grip around his throat and wrapped her legs around him in a scissor hold. More ice-cold water seeped into her clothes as she held him in place, his back pressed against her front. He struggled against her grip, but he had no leverage, no good angle of attack. She locked her ankles to keep him down.  

“Stop it,” she panted.  

“Let go.” He pulled at the arm across his throat. A choked sound escaped him as she tightened the grip further.

It wasn’t his fault: she knew it was the hypothermia that had him fighting her. Or the head injury. Maybe he was bleeding, maybe pressure was building around his brain, making him combative and confused. She didn’t want to think about which of those two things were worse, but the ease with which she had taken him down was a frightening sign of how far gone he was. She let the fear and worry and fatigue tip over into anger as he continued to struggle. Anger was more productive, and she needed to get him out of those clothes. _Now_. 

“Get off,” he wheezed. His fingers still scrabbled over the arm across his throat. “Get off.”

“Don’t fight me," she growled into his ear. “You hear me, Barton? _Don’t_. I will choke you out and fucking cut you out of your clothes if I have to." She tightened her legs around him when he twisted. “Stop fighting!”  

Clint gave a strangled growl. The sound disintegrated into a whimper halfway through, and he sagged heavily against her. “Let go,” he moaned. The fire in his voice was suddenly gone, replaced by a threadbare, watery quality that told Natasha that he was miles beyond the end of his rope, the outburst a last desperate flare of energy ( _the terminal thrashing of a dying animal_ , her mind whispered before she could shut down that horrible thought).

For a few seconds, the only sounds in the room were her harsh breathing and a terrible wavering sound from Clint. She slowly eased up on the grip across his throat, but didn’t let go. She kept her legs wrapped around him, held him securely in place.

“Nat, please. Please, let me go," he wailed.    

“I’ll let go if you stop fighting,” she said.

She waited. When he remained slumped against her, unmoving and heavy, she carefully unlocked her legs and braced her foot against the floor. With a grunt she managed to twist them both enough to get out from under him. He curled up on his side away from her, his hands pressed over his face.

She stretched to retrieve the flashlight that had spun away. “You’re going to lie there and not move a fucking inch, do you hear me?” She scooted down to his feet. “Don’t kick me,” she warned darkly.

His laces were crusted with ice and difficult to undo, but she finally managed. His boots made a wet sound as they came off. She worked his snow pants off, then tugged his sopping long johns and underwear down. It wasn’t easy with him not helping, and she cursed in frustration when they snagged around his ankles. As soon as they were off, she pulled his hands away from his face and dragged him up into a sitting position. He hunched over, but didn’t resist as she cautiously gripped the edge of his shirt again.     

This time it came off without as much as a sound and he was sitting naked on the cold floor. She snagged the towel from where she had dropped it and started wiping him down. Everything in her wanted to scrub him down, go fast and hard and rub some heat into him, but she didn’t dare to. Getting the cold blood from his extremities circulating too fast could outright kill him.

As she worked, she catalogued his injuries. A few abrasions. A lot of soon-to-be bruises. His skin was pale, and it made the marks stand out vividly. A particularly large, bluish-red bruise wrapped up the side of his knee. No wonder he’d been limping. She took his hands and quickly checked his fingers for any signs of early frost bite, but found none. When she glanced up at his face, she saw his eyes had closed.  

She shook him. "Hey!" He blinked his eyes open, but closed them almost immediately. She gave him another shake, harder this time. "Come on, stay awake."

He hunched down. "Tired."

"I know, but you can’t sleep. Not yet.”

She finished drying him off, checking his face every few seconds, but to her relief, his unfocused eyes remained half-open. She scrubbed the towel one last time over his head, then dropped it and slipped her arm under his.

“Okay, now that you won’t get the bed wet, let's get you warm."  

"Don' wet th' bed,” he mumbled.  

With some questionable help from Clint, she managed to get him to the bed and boost him up. He curled up with a groan and she pulled the thick blanket over him, tucking it in tightly around him. God, she ached to crawl in under it with him, but she still had things she needed to do. She stumbled to the radiator underneath the window and turned it up as far as it would go.

She had to sit down on the floor to get her boots and pants off, too clumsy and uncoordinated from the cold to maintain her balance. She had no idea how Clint had even stayed on his feet for as long as he had.

Clint moaned pitifully as she pulled the blankets out from around him and could finally slip inside. His bare skin was still ice cold, and she hissed as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled weakly at her to get closer. She clenched her teeth and draped herself half on top of him in a bid to provide as much skin-on-skin contact and body heat as she could. She pulled the blanket up over their heads, covering them completely.

The cabin was dark, but under the blanket it was darker. She found the pulse point on his neck by feel and pressed her trembling fingers against it. She couldn’t feel it, her fingers were too numb. She snaked an arm out and grabbed the flashlight from where she’d dropped it on the mattress.  

She turned it on. The blanket was resting close around them, trapping most of the light in its folds, so she lifted it a fraction to see him. His eyes had closed again and she patted his cheek. “Clint.” She watched him closely, still half-waiting for him to start fighting her again, but it seemed there was none of that left in him. When he didn’t answer she gave his shoulder a little shake. “Hey,” she said, a little louder. “No sleeping. Talk to me.”

He shrugged his shoulder in a weak attempt to dislodge her hand and burrowed closer against her.

“Come on, I can’t get you to shut up any other time, but _now_ you’re clamming up? What would Coulson say if he knew you were sleeping on the job?” 

He said something against her neck, but it was too muffled to make out what.

“Come again?”

“Take five,” he mumbled, a little louder this time.    

“No break yet, the job isn’t done.” As far as Natasha was concerned, surviving was most definitely part of the mission objective.    

A weak tremor ran through him again. “No, that’s what he’d say. Take five, Bart’n.”

She took his freezing hands and pressed them to her stomach, her breath catching as they made contact. “Are we talking about the same man here? Phil Coulson? When did he ever let you get away with napping on the job?” 

“Durban.”     

It took a second for her to locate the memory of that op and wipe the mental dust off.

Phil had arrived in South Africa a week into the job to take over from Carey, who had come down with Norovirus and been put in isolation to try to contain it. When Phil got there, Clint had been awake for thirty-seven hours straight, waiting behind his scope for their mark to show his face and take a much deserved bullet to the head. Phil had walked in, taken one look at him and told him to take a break. Clint hadn’t even protested, he’d just left his position behind his sniper rifle and shuffled to the rear wall of the warehouse, curling up on the gritty floor between tall, precarious stacks of boxes filled with counterfeit sunglasses and shoes. The op had ended up being scrubbed early the next morning. Mainly because the containment hadn’t been enough and two thirds of six-man team had been too busy throwing up to be of any use.

Phil hadn’t stepped in often; had mostly left it to Clint to decide when enough was enough, but when he felt he needed to, he’d pulled the plug. From what she heard, that had caused some friction early on, but by the time she arrived, it had been all sorted out. Clint had figured out that Phil shutting down an op wasn’t a reflection of his level of confidence in Clint, and Phil in turn had learned when to let Clint push himself and when to put his foot down.

Phil had been good that way, had looked out for them both. But sometimes it wasn’t possible to give operatives a break, and there had been times when he’d been forced to drive them both hard. More than once they’d been handed stimulants to keep them going long beyond their limits. Clint had been in those situations more often than she had. She remembered him arriving back at base that time one dose from Phil had turned into two, into three, but finally not even the amphetamines and the Modafinils had been enough to keep him going. He’d stumbled off the transporter, awake and moving, but not quite _there_ , nothing but dull emptiness behind his eyes. A little like now. A lot like now.     

She pulled the blanket tighter around them. “Well, you looked pretty pathetic back there, so it’s no wonder he took pity on you. He always was a pushover.”  

“Wasn’t.”    

“Please. He was a _total_ pushover when it came to you.”

“Jus’ jealous,” Clint grumbled.  

“Sure. _So_ jealous of you and him and your annoying tiptoeing around each other.”

She closed her mouth sharply, instantly regretting the words. There had always been something between Clint and Phil, something neither of them had openly acknowledged or acted on. She’s not sure either of them ever would have, but there had always been the possibility of something. Until suddenly there wasn’t, until there was nothing left, because Loki had happened and Phil had died and everything had changed.

She grasped for something safer. “Frequent flyer miles.” When he didn’t answer, she poked him hard in the ribs. “Policy on using frequent flyer miles for private travels. Come on. This is an easy one. Benefits accrued from…”

“I don’ know,” he groaned. 

“Yes, you do. Come on.”  

It was a familiar game, something they’d played for years when stake-outs stretched impossibly long, when boredom took over and extraction was hours away. Phil had been the game master most of the time, quizzing them on SHIELD’s various regulations, in person or over the radio link, just to pass the time. The more ridiculous and outdated regulation, the better, but right now Natasha was too tired to be elaborate, so she’d picked the first one that came to mind.  

“Come on.” She nudged him again. “Benefits accrued…”

“Benefits accrued from… from traveling on agency business…” He trailed off. 

“Benefits accrued from traveling on agency business, regardless of means of transportation, are the property of SHIELD. Private use is not allowed. Here’s another easy one. Paternity leave. Go.”  

He was silent for so long Natasha thought she was going to have to resort to more brutal means of keeping him awake and talking, but then he gave a shuddery sigh. “Daddy leave,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Twenty days.” 

“You have to do better than that. Partial credit at best.”

The origin of this game had predated Natasha’s arrival, and it had surprised her to find that Clint, seemingly so relaxed about rules in general, was able to quote most of them verbatim. Section, sub-section, page number. He must have memorized them all. Not the most exciting reading, and certainly not something she had expected Clint to do. He wasn’t a big reader; not like Natasha, who always carried a paperback in her bag when not on a job, who valued the opportunity to lose herself in a world far away from her own. Crime, adventure, romance, she wasn’t picky. Clint had been more or less illiterate when Phil brought him in (third grade reading-level, the note in his files said), but a year of school in parallel with his basic training had remedied that and filled in the most basic gaps in his education. His G.E.D. had come two and a half years in, his first university credits a few years after that, so she knew reading and writing hadn’t been a problem for a long, long time.

But she also knew that if you put a text in his hands and told him to read it out loud, he’d do anything short of setting the building on fire to not have to do it.

It wasn’t performance anxiety or stage fright; she’d seen him walk up in front of a large crowd and talk about tactics, strategy, advanced surveillance techniques, how to blend into a crowd, how to bake a freaking plum pudding, and he _excelled_ at it. It wasn’t hard to see remnants of the Amazing Hawkeye - the one from the Carson’s Carnival of Traveling Wonders posters – hiding under the surface of grown up Clint Barton those times. No as showy, not as desperate for the attention and the spotlight, but loving it nonetheless, so the avoidant behavior didn’t make sense to her.

She’d asked Phil about it one day when they’d stood at the range and watched Clint practice.

 _“Reading out loud is…”_ Phil had hesitated for a moment, like he’d been searching for the right word. _“It’s loaded for Barton.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Punish someone enough times for failing and it sticks. It goes deep.”_

She’d nodded, because he’d said it like it explained everything, but she still hadn’t fully understood what he meant. She hadn’t enjoyed the Red Room’s teaching philosophy, but she couldn’t argue with the results. It had been an effective incentive to try harder, to do your best, to never fail, and she had become a better operative for it. Something apparently must have clued Phil in to what she’d been thinking, because he’d gotten that unhappy look on his face, the one that told Natasha she’d revealed something about herself she shouldn’t have. But to her relief he hadn’t called her on it this time.

 _“Learning to read and write was never easy for him, and the methodology some of his teachers used was, well, questionable, at best.”_ He’d sighed and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. _“Ridicule and humiliation is sometimes harder to get past than pain_. _”_  

That, at least, had been something she could relate to.

She poked him again. “Come on, Barton. Paternal leave,” she reminded him.  

“Later, ‘kay? Just need to… need to close my eyes for a while.”

“Not yet. You need to warm up a little, then I’ll let you sleep. I promise.”

“I’m okay,” he mumbled. “Jus’ cold. Tired.”

“No, you’re not okay, Clint. You’re really not.” Her throat suddenly felt thick, and wow, the goddamn cold had to be messing her up big time, because hot tears suddenly prickled at her eyes. Clint wasn’t okay. She’d gotten him out of his clothes and hopefully her body and the blanket would be enough to pull him through, but they’d both beaten the odds for a very long time, and one of these days she knew one of them would lose. Despite their skills, despite never leaving anything to chance, despite their best efforts she knew they would eventually lose, and on dark days when she saw nothing in her future but a dead-end road coming up fast, she entertained the thought that she wanted to die first.

He’d always been the one who kept her from becoming what they made her all those years ago, and who she could count on to reset her compass when it strayed. If she lost that, who would she become? He was the only one with whom she didn’t have to pull her punches, physical or verbal, because Clint always gave as good as he got, and in a life of playing other people, of telling lies and working every angle except the truth, what they had was _real_. Even their fights felt more real. They were loud, the blows often dirty and vicious, but when the dust settled she could always trust him to still be there, stuck at the other end of the invisible elastic tether that tied them together. No matter how much tension they put on that bond, how far they ran to get away, they always ended up in each other’s orbits again. 

She’d never told him she sometimes still woke up from dreams in which Loki had won. The horror that made her tremble under the covers those times didn’t just come from watching the monsters fill up the sky, or the destruction of their world, or the blood and the dead and the dying that lined the streets. It was Loki stealing him, taking the one thing in her life she dared trust not to crumble under the full weight of the horror that was Natasha Romanoff. Her solid ground.        

She rested her forehead against his and placed her hand on his cheek. “Bedrock,” she whispered, the word slipping out without conscious decision.

He shifted, blinked sluggishly. “What?”  

She breathed in, then slowly let the air out of her lungs, trying to find her center. Getting weepy and emotional wouldn’t do either of them any good. “Lucky thing you have a head like bedrock,” she said, louder. “Someone less hard-headed would’ve had their skull cracked open.”

“ _Feels_ cracked." He squinted and grimaced against the glare of the flashlight. “Kill the light. Hurts.”

“Only if you keep talking.”

“I _am_ talking.”

“And you’re going to keep doing it.”

“Don’t‘ve much choice, do I?” he mumbled.   

“No.” She turned the flashlight off and blackness enveloped them under the blanket. “You can start with the paternal leave. No way Phil would have given you points for that.”

Clint pressed closer against her side. “Paternal leave. For a married… No. Uh. Command shall authorize twenty… uh, twenty consecutive days of paid leave for a married male operative when his… his spouse gives birth.” The sentence unfolded slowly, sluggishly.  

“And…?”

“Jesus,” he groaned.

“Quit whining. And…?”  

“Leave will be granted at Command’s discretion, depending on mission and… and specific op’rational circustam— circus—”

“Circumstances,” she provided.

“Yeah. That.”   

“Good enough.”

She quizzed him on a few more SHIELD regulations, but despite the fact that he managed to recite most of them to some degree of accuracy, albeit haltingly, she got the distinct feeling he was slipping further, that he was answering them on autopilot. She decided to change tack.

“Tell me about Phil,” she said. “What did you like about him?”

He didn’t answer.

“Come on. What did you like about him?”

“Don’t,” he mumbled. “Nat, just… don’t.”

“I’m not going to stop asking, so you might as well answer.” She poked him again. “What did you like about Phil Coulson?”  

Clint gave a ragged sigh. “Everything. I liked everything.”

“Such as?”

“His badassery.”

“That’s not even a word, but I fully agree with you, so go on. What else?”

Clint wiggled closer and slid his cold hands up Natasha’s sides a few inches, no doubt looking for a warmer patch of skin, one he hadn’t leached heat from. “He baked. For me.”

Natasha laughed quietly. “Sorry to break it to you, but I think he actually bought those cookies.”

“He’d wait for us,” Clint said, like he hadn’t heard her.      

Natasha had liked that, too; Phil meeting them when they climbed off whatever transporter had brought them back, even if it was late, even if he hadn’t been involved in the job in question. His unassuming presence at the back of the docking bay had always felt like a porch light left on, a ‘welcome home’ just for them.

She decided to add one of her own items to the list. “I liked the way the assholes who took him for a paper-pusher looked when he wiped the floor with them.” 

“Mmm.”   

“And the way he handled his Colt.” She’d appreciated those competent hands when they wrapped around that gun and fired perfect series on the range, when they field-stripped an M16, or moved quickly, unerringly, over his keyboard. When they touched her shoulder, or her arm, or her hand.

“His eyes,” Clint said, and something hollow in his voice made her decide to change the subject.

“Tell me about your first op,” she said. She knew that story, and Phil wasn’t in it. He hadn’t been Clint’s handler back then, and the job had been straightforward and uneventful from start to finish. Well, almost to finish, because half hour out from the helicarrier they’d suffered a double engine failure and had to ditch in the Mediterranean.

It took a little verbal and physical prodding, but Clint eventually started talking again. The narrative was still halting and he trailed off twice, but Natasha got him back on track. She kept interrupting, kept asking for clarifications and details. When he was done, she demanded he tell her his favorite mission (Alaska), his most stupid mission (also Alaska, another time), the longest one, the shortest, anything mission related that didn’t end in people dying or Phil Coulson making an appearance.

It slowly got warmer under the blanket. She talked and kept him talking back, and slowly, ever so slowly she started hearing a difference. He still sounded drowsy and exhausted, but the words gradually took on more shape and inflection, the details in his descriptions growing sharper and more substantial. She knew it would still be hours before his core temperature would be even close to normal, but it was a step in the right direction.


	4. Chapter 4

She was quizzing him about safe houses they’d stayed in when he suddenly made a soft, pained sound against her. She lifted her head, peered down at him. “You okay?”

“Hurts,” he muttered.  

“What hurts? Your head?” She fumbled for the flashlight, wanting to check his eyes in case they had started showing signs of something worse than a concussion. Intracranial bleeding didn’t always manifest in blown or uneven pupils, but if it did this time she needed to know, because she’d have to reconsider everything. She would have to decide what would be the bigger risk - dragging him back out into the cold or not getting him proper medical attention.

“My hands,” he moaned. She felt his fingers curl in the space between them. “Feet. My fucking _skin_. All over.”

She relaxed and let her hand rest on the flashlight without turning it on. She felt it, too, the pins-and-needles of nerves returning to normal operation. It had been there for a while now, and she knew it would grow worse, the tingle would spread and intensify until it was a humming blanket of acid-laced white noise under her skin. It would be painful, but what she got would be nothing compared to what Clint would experience.  

“It’s a good sign,” she told him. “You’re warming up. It’ll burn for a while, but it will pass.”

“So fucked up. Getting warm shouldn’t hurt worse than the cold.”  

“Try to relax.”

“Easy for you to say,” he muttered. He squirmed against her, and a sharp breath hissed past his teeth. “We need a comic," he ground out.   

“Why?”

“There’s a blanket. And a flashlight.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Didn’t you ever sneak-read under the covers?”

“No. Did you?”

“Not comics. Barney wouldn’t let me touch his, but I had this book. Read it so much the spine got worn out.”

“What was it about?”

“Fishes. And a boy.” He shifted again, and groaned under his breath. “He could talk to them. I think. I don’t know, I just looked at the pictures and made things up.”

“What kind of fish?”

“Tropical. Pretty ones. I thought all fish looked like that.”

“You must have been sorely disappointed.”

“Very.”

When Clint fell silent again, Natasha nudged him. “What happened to it? Did you have to leave it?” She was strangely intrigued by the mental image of Clint as a young boy, hiding under his blanket with a flashlight and a book he couldn’t read, being oh so quiet as he turned the pages and wove his stories about pretty fishes.

“Barney tore the pages out because I pissed him off. I cried for a week.”

“I had a book,” Natasha said.    

She regretted the words the moment they passed her lips. This memory had always been velvet soft in her mind, like something pretty, something small and defenseless and so unlike most other things in there. It felt like a dangerous thing to bring it out for someone else to see, even if that someone was Clint, who would never be careless with her memories. 

“Yeah?”

“It was about a rabbit.” She had to force the words out. “A toy rabbit,” she clarified. "It was gray. And very wise.”  

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know. I think it was before.”

They both had them. ‘Befores’. Before the Red Room. Before the orphanage.

There were others. Before Loki for him. Before Ankara for her. Before Barney. Before the children's hospital, Budapest, Salt Lake City. Before, before, before; a long line of dark milestones behind them, one-way doorways that once they had stepped through them (or been shoved through them) there was no going back. She did her best to remember they weren't all bad. _Before you_ , Clint had slipped in a few times over the years, but he’d said it like it was the _after_ that mattered, the unspoken word heavy with the implication that what had followed had been so much better than what came before. They didn't talk much about their befores, but she hoped he knew that he, too, was a good one; a before that really meant an after. 

He tightened his arm around her. “Sounds like a nice book." 

She hesitated. “I’m not sure it was actually mine,” she finally admitted. “If the _memory_ is even mine. I think it is, but it might just be another backstory they gave me.” She put her hand on his forehead, then his shoulder, then his chest, suddenly done with the subject. His skin felt warmer under her fingers. “How are you feeling?”   

“Like there’s fucking fire ants under my skin.”

“It’ll get better. Hold on a little longer, then you can sleep,” she promised.

“How long?”

“Not long. Now, pay attention. This is a recently updated list of things we should strive to avoid.” She started tapping her fingers against the skin of his shoulder, spelling out words in tactile Morse code. Not only would it keep him awake, but it would also tell her things about his higher cognitive functions. 

“Falling off… bridges?” he said when her fingers came to a stop.

“That’s real high on the list right now. Imagine that.” She tapped her fingers twice to make sure she had his attention again. “Okay, list of things to avoid, continued.” She began tapping.     

“Sitwell...” He trailed off.

She spelled it out again, slower this time.

He huffed a laugh against her collar bone. “Sitwell after Mexican night,” he mumbled. “Gotcha.”       

Fury before multiple cups of coffee. Shrimp sandwiches from the Kahula Shack. Every goddamn shop in continental US on Black Friday. Licking freezing metal posts (‘and by that, I mean _you_ should avoid it, dumbass’). She had to go slow, and she had to repeat herself a few times, but the fact that Clint got most of them eventually was yet another sign things were going in the right direction.  

She kept talking to him and tapping out things for him to echo back to her. Her list gradually changed from ‘things to avoid’ to just random things: As many of Clint’s recurring aliases that she could think of. The things on the to-do list that had been taped to Clint’s fridge for the past three years. Places in Europe they’d been to together. Clint’s favorite music. Her favorite foods. All the laws they’d broken when _not_ on a job. Anything she could think of.

*    *    *

Natasha slowly opened her eyes. The room was still dim, but dawn was bleeding the darkness out of the sky outside the window, leaving a cold wash of icy pastels in its place.

Clint made a disgruntled sound as she sat up, and tightened his grip around her. She crossed her arms over her chest. The radiator had raised the temperature in the room a little, but it was still chilly and goosebumps rose all over her body.

She hadn’t slept, just dozed, listening for sounds from the outside, from the inside, from Clint - his breathing, the thump-thump of his heart under her ear, the pace of it slowly settling back into his usual resting range.

She shook his shoulder. “Wake up.” 

He buried her face against her. “Five more minutes,” he mumbled. 

She slid her legs over the edge of the bed and steeled herself before setting her feet down on the floor. “You get three.”

Clint grabbed blindly for the edge of the blanket and pulled it over his head.

Their clothes were on the floor where she’d left them, and she crouched down and started sorting through her pile. She should probably have wrung out the clothes before lying down, at least Clint’s. Not that they would have had time to dry out, not with the room this chilly, but any water she removed would have been a good thing.

Getting dressed was an exercise in misery, and before she was done, she was shivering again, but the sooner she could get the car started and warmed up, the sooner she could get warm again. She tucked the blanket closer around Clint and headed out.

Silence lay heavy around the cabin. No birds. No traffic. No voices. Not even the whisper of wind through the trees. The only sounds were the distant, hollow caw of a raven and the crunch of snow under her boots as she trudged towards the car. She started the car and left it idling. She found the half-peeled energy bar wedged between the seat and the passenger door. It went into her pocket for Clint, then she pulled out the floor mat he had thrown up on and dumped it in the trunk before hurrying back inside.   

She slipped back into the small bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. She shook Clint’s shoulder. “Your three minutes are up. Rise and shine.”  

He reached up without opening his eyes and patted the top of her head with a clumsy hand.  

“Come on. Up.” She slapped at his hand when it kept pawing at her.

“Your snooze button is broken,” he mumbled.    

“Get up, or I’m leaving without you.”

“You’re mean.” He cracked his eyes open. He was still pale, but his cheeks were warmly flushed. The blanket slid down a fraction as he raked a hand through his lank hair. It lay flat against his skull on one side, stood up on the other. “Where the hell are we?” He squinted at the room.  

“Hunting cabin. About ten miles from the bridge.”

He sat up with a groan and pulled the blanket up around him, clutching it tightly. His knuckles were badly scraped. Blood had dried dark around the edges of a few of his nails. One looked like it had torn off halfway down the nail bed and Natasha wondered if it was from clawing at the ice, from desperately trying to find a grip on the rocks in the rapids.  

He rubbed at his eyes. “That’s a little close, isn’t it? What happened to the plan?” 

“I had to freestyle a bit. How do you feel?” 

“Like I’ve been put through a spin cycle from hell.” He prodded gingerly at the side of his head. “Ow. A spin cycle with jagged rocks.”

“Sounds about right.” She sat down next to him and peeled the remaining wrapper from the energy bar before handing it to him. His fingers were reassuringly warm against hers as he took it. “I think you headbutted one of those jagged rocks when you went down the river.”

“That would explain the massive headache,” he muttered. He took a bite of the energy bar. “What time is it?” he asked as he chewed.    

“Almost nine.”

“Nine?” That seemed to wake him up. “We should move.”

“Just waiting for you. _Again_.”   

With a groan he slid his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the soggy pile of clothes on the floor. He pulled it closer and started digging through it. “Wanna fill me in on what the hell happened?”   

“What do you remember?” 

“Pretty much everything up to the car spinning out. After that it gets a little foggy.”   

“The bridge was icy. You slipped. Hit your head pretty hard when you landed.”

He watched her for a beat, apparently waiting for something. When it didn’t come, he raised an eyebrow. “What? No quips about that?”

She got to her feet and crossed the floor to the window. No. No quips about that. Not yet, not this close to almost-disaster. She pushed the threadbare curtain to the side with her finger. A fringe of frost had formed on the inside of the window, spreading around the edge of the glass like lace.

“You worried,” he said behind her, his voice low. “You really worried.”

She turned away from the window. “Get dressed, Barton. We have to get moving.”

Clint looked like he was itching to say something more, but to Natasha’s relief he must have decided against it, because he went back to digging through the pile of clothes at his feet. The blanket slid down from his shoulders. The bruises on his arms and torso looked worse now. Darker. The scrapes looked red and raw.

He pulled out his shirt and made a face. “ _Fuck_ ,” he muttered under his breath as he threaded his arms through the sleeves.  

Natasha considered the blanket that pooled around him. “I guess you could skip the clothes and just stick with the blanket.” Someone dressed only in a blanket and bruised all to hell would attract attention if they were pulled over, but his wet clothes wouldn’t be any less conspicuous, so she figured it was a toss-up.  

“Admit it,” he said and gave the shirt one last disgusted glare before peeling it off his arms. ”You’re just looking for an excuse to get me naked.” 

“You’re already naked,” she pointed out. “And even if you weren’t, it’s not like getting you there would be a huge challenge.”   

He pulled the blanket up tightly around his shoulders again. “You sayin’ I’m easy?”  

“Please, you drop your pants at a light breeze, you big man-whore.”

“Words hurt.” He sounded put out, but the tired, almost-crinkling at the corners of his eyes gave him away. “Knowing you, you were leering the whole time. Bet you copped a proper feel, too.”

She laughed. “Ice water really doesn’t do any man any favors.”

He looked down at his blanket-covered lap. “Don’t listen to her, Big Boy. You’re perfect.” He accepted the boots Natasha brought over. They weren't dripping, but they were still plenty wet, and he made a face as he pulled the first one on. “Walk me through what happened.”

She shrugged. “Not much to walk through. You took out the driver. I took out Gato and Fuller, then went to get your sorry ass off the ice.”

His fingers suddenly stopped over the laces. He looked up, his eyes closed off. “The kid?”

“She wasn’t in the car.”

He relaxed visibly. “Okay, good.” He turned his attention back to his boots. “I don’t remember falling, but I remember going through the ice. Fuck me, that was a pretty brutal wakeup call.” He grimaced as he looped the laces and tied them off. “Felt like being punched in the chest. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.”

 _You and me, both_ , Natasha thought darkly.

“Then the water dragged me under the ice, and I thought it was game over. Jesus.” He sat up and scrubbed at his face. “It was pitch black, and the water just tossed me around like a freaking ragdoll. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get any air, and—" He stopped abruptly, then shook his head. "Yeah, and then I probably hit one of the rocks, because I have no idea what happened, just that suddenly I wasn’t in the water any longer and you were there. Did you pull me out?”  

“You made it out on your own. You don’t remember?” 

He shook his head. “I just remember bits of pieces of you dragging me to the car. I was sick. I think. Wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’re not getting the deposit back on the rental.”

Clint made a disgusted face. “Inside the car? Ugh. That’s gross. I thought it was outside.” He wrapped his arms around himself again, hunched down a little more. “God, I was so cold, and so fucking _tired_ , and then we were here, and I was pissed because you wouldn’t let me—“ He stared at her, his eyes wide and horrified, then dropped his head into his hands.

“What?”

“I kicked you.”

She waved it away. “It’s fine.”

He looked up from behind his hands. “You have a fucked up definition of fine. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Once, maybe. Twice at most.”

“I’m so sorry.”  

“It was a lame kick. Girly, even, so you’re forgiven.”

“Can’t have been all that girly if you look like that.”

She got to her feet, resisting the urge to touch the bruise, to map out the damage with her fingers. “I’ll take my revenge the next time we spar, okay? Come on. We have to get moving.”

Clint got to his feet. He’d taken two slow, stiff steps when he suddenly swayed. He braced his hands heavily on his knees.

She reached out and steadied him. “What’s wrong?”

“Head rush,” he breathed.  

She guided him back to the bed and he sat down heavily on the edge. “Your body burned through glucose like a wildfire. Your blood sugar is probably somewhere down by your ankles. I’ll check the kitchen. Maybe there’s something for you to eat.” From what little she had seen during her search of the cabin, she knew there wasn’t much in there, but maybe she’d missed something. She had been so focused on finding something to dry him off with.

She wanted something sweet, something with a high calorie count that would help get his levels up quick. She found it tucked away in a corner cabinet. On the top shelf, all the way in the back sat an almost empty box of sugar cubes. She popped two pieces in her mouth while walking back to the bedroom. Clint wasn’t the only one who needed a boost.

She stripped the bed of the blanket, the sheet and the pillow case. All had Clint’s blood on them, coming from his cuts and scrapes. She’d dump them somewhere down the road, far away, because even though their genetic footprints were regularly scrubbed from most national and international databases - courtesy of SHIELD’s many and varied cyber worms - it never hurt to be careful. 

She bundled Clint’s clothes in the sheet and did a quick final check to make sure they hadn’t left anything behind.

“Okay, let’s go,” she ordered. She stayed close as he got to his feet, just in case he got dizzy again, but this time he was fine.

He shuffled ahead of her, towards the door. “Fuck,” he muttered as they stepped outside, his breath clouding white in the drab morning light. He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “Cold.”   

“The car isn’t far. It’s up front, just follow the tracks.”   

Clint moved stiffly, the limp more pronounced now. No doubt he was feeling every single hit he’d taken in the rapids.

She trailed him as they rounded the corner of the cabin. “Blanket, boots, bruises, and hairy legs,” she smirked. “Very hobo-chic.”

He half-turned and looked at her haughtily over his shoulder, the box of sugar still pressed to his chest. “Bitch _,_ please, I pull this off like a motherfucking boss.” He twisted sharply and cursed as he misstepped and ended up outside the narrow trail. “Dammit,” he said morosely when he regained his balance. “I have snow in my boots now.”  

“That’s what you get for calling me a bitch, Barton.” 

They reached the car, and she directed him into the back. She deposited the bundle in the trunk and got into the driver’s seat. The inside of the car was toasty, but her damp clothes were already freezing and she shivered. She felt nowhere near as cold as she had before, but she still envied Clint his dry blanket. Sadly, there was still just the one, so she was just going to have to suck it up.

She glanced in the rearview mirror. He was hunched over, shoulders high and arms crossed over his chest. Despite sleeping for a few hours, he still looked exhausted. “Lie down and get some more sleep,” she told him. “I’ll wake you when we get close.”

He shot her a grateful look. “I like the way you think, Romanoff.” With a bit back groan, he slid down and curled up on his side. She adjusted the mirror a fraction to keep an half and eye on him.   

She checked the heaters again and made sure they were at max before she put the car in reverse and got them back on the road.

“Hey, Nat?”  

“Yeah?”

“Are _you_ okay?” 

“There’s nothing wrong with me that a warm shower and ten hours of sleep won’t magically fix.”   

“Good.”

Natasha settled in for the drive. She took them back onto larger roads and away from the bridge. Eventually they hit the highway that would take them to the other car. There were no road blocks, was no overt police presence. She switched the radio on, turned the volume down low.

The bleak winter sun slowly clawed its way above the treetops. Traffic was light and she allowed herself to relax a little. A few miles later, she glanced over her shoulder. Clint’s eyes were closed, his lashes dark against the pale skin.

“Just so you know,” she said under her breath, “I’m clipping a goddamn bungee cord on you next time.”

“Don’t need it,” came his sleepy voice from the backseat. “I got you.”

 

~ The End  ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay! It's done! Clint is warm and Natasha will soon get that shower and that ten-hour nap! 
> 
> Thanks are in order. So first, thank you, dear reader, for tagging along on this ride. And second, a MASSIVE thank you to Teeelsie for the amazing beta job (any remaining mistakes are all mine. I can't help tinkering and changing things up after getting it back) and also to sweetest Ranni for all the encouragement and nudging and outright nagging (and for providing an impressive list of names Clint might give to his penis, even though I ended up going with a vanilla one in the end). You ladies rock!


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